“My children don’t do wheat-free.” What?

We went as a family to a wedding last weekend – beautiful, small, intimate, English wedding in the country. Marquee on the lawn, lovely gardens with ponds and streams, and – coincidentally – the Red Arrows and other planes flying overhead as part of the nearby Air Tattoo. (Very appropriate, as many of the guests seemed to be airforce, or civil pilots).

The bride had gone to a lot of trouble to arrange entertainment for the 12 children at the wedding, to keep them entertained while the adults ate – t-shirt painting, glass-painting, games, DVDs and so on.

She had also arranged for a special party tea for the children, and party bags with presents for them. Crisps, sandwiches, cheese cubes, crudites … and she had been very careful to organise a wide range of cakes and biscuits, which were all gluten free, so that my coeliac daughter could eat freely from the table. (We’d brought our own gluten free bread for the sandwiches).

I was touched that she’d gone to so much effort on her own special day.

Which made it even more shocking that later in the evening, she whispered to me that one of the other guests had decided to whisk her two children away to McDonalds, saying “my children don’t do wheat-free”.

What? What was she thinking?

I can’t decide which feeling is uppermost – I am horrified by how rude this is, and astonished that someone could object so strongly to food that was gluten-free. It wasn’t even as if the children were going to go hungry if they didn’t eat any cake …

I just hope my coeliac daughter didn’t hear this woman spurn the food so lovingly provided for her.

Comments

Some people are so uneducated! My kids can eat wheat but my brother’s kids can’t. We have learned how to have a full family gathering that is gluten free. If someone were to just stop in at the gathering, they would never even notice that the wheat/gluten was not there!

Hi Char – I think that’s the best way to do it, and mostly people wouldn’t even notice. My friend had left the packaging around so I could see that everything would be OK – probably never dreaming that it would be a problem to anyone else!

I’m surprised by this, at least it was healthy food. But to take their child away from the party, which already had “good” food there, to go to McDs. Eeek! That was awesome of the bride to do that though for ya.

So people would rather load their kids bodies with fat, calories and rot from McD’s rather then healthy, gluten-free food? I don’t understand that one. Kudos to the bride for doing so much to make sure your daughter was safe.

The truly sad thing here, is that this woman has taught her children that it is OK to go to a formal function and refuse the food served, leave and get food more to your liking and RETURN later. How sad is that?

If I remember correctly, if her children were picky she should have fed them prior to the event, taught them to “move the food around on their plates” to look like they were eating. Politely state that they weren’t hungry when offered more or when someone inquired about the quality of the food and then fed them again when they got home.

To not only have done this, but to have informed the hostess that her food was not good enough?? Well, more invitations would not be forthcoming if she was my guest. If your daughter finds out, you should not call attention to to it being about gluten free at all, but to it being about manners. Tell her they would have done this if they had been fed asparagus, or “grown up” food instead of childrens fair as well. Explain how proud you are of her and her behavior, and manners etc.

You have a great friend!! My family works really hard to try to find at least one gluten free option at all of our catered events, I know it’s hard. Good job for the bride to add that to her hectic day.

And Laney you are so right about the polite way to have handled that. Also, I like the suggestion about explaining to my daughter that it is about manners, not the food itself – I expect they would have rejected ‘grown-up food’ too!

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